Nvidia Geforce GT 220 & Premiere CS4 question

[Alain Aguilar]

I'm trying to get Premiere CS4 to use the Cuda, GPU acceleration of my Nvidia GT 220 card. Any suggestions? Currently, Premiere takes forever to render H264 files from the Canon 5d.

[Adam Gold]

CS4 doesn't have that ability. You need CS5, a compatible card and possibly the "hack" detailed in this forum.

[Randall Leong]

Originally Posted by Alain Aguilar

I'm trying to get Premiere CS4 to use the Cuda, GPU acceleration of my Nvidia GT 220 card. Any suggestions? Currently, Premiere takes forever to render H264 files from the Canon 5d.

As Adam stated, CS4 does not use GPU acceleration at all. What's more, its code is simply very sloppy: As a 32-bit program, it cannot use more than about 3GB of RAM - and yet it demands far more physical RAM than it can use. As such, expect a lot of hiccups and slowdowns as well as "Out Of Memory" error messages.

And most GT 220s are unsuitable for use with CS5's MPE GPU acceleration feature due to their use of only DDR2 memory. And even with DDR3/GDDR3 memory on the card, the GT 220 is really only suitable for use with a lower-end dual-core CPU with MPE GPU acceleration enabled: It has only 48 CUDA cores; the official Adobe-certified GPUs have at least 192. And the guide to those "hacks" strongly recommends a GPU with at least 96 CUDA cores (as found in the GT 240) for it to perform better than software-only mode.

So in other words, if you have CS5 and a GT 220 with DDR2 memory on the graphics card, don't bother performing the hack at all - but instead leave it permanently set in software-only mode.

[Alain Aguilar]

Thank you for the insight. I was hoping to make an old system work with GPU (but cheap) based video card. Mainly to edit two to five minutes H.264 from a Canon 5d. Now I've definitely found some workarounds for editing but when it's time to export I can just forget it and walk away for a couple of hours.

I'll try this plugin: it's a free trial www.divideframe.com . It supposedly accelerates Premiere CS4 when working with Canon 5d H.264 files? It's an older program, but if this doesn't work, I'm quitting my hopes to get this system to render fast and will enjoy the time spent while I render.

Randall, thanks for the info about the cores. This is indeed good to know.

[Randall Leong]

Originally Posted by Alain Aguilar

I'm trying to get Premiere CS4 to use the Cuda, GPU acceleration of my Nvidia GT 220 card. Any suggestions? Currently, Premiere takes forever to render H264 files from the Canon 5d.

Actually, such an old system is too weak to perform native AVCHD editing. That system might have an early dual-core CPU or even a single-core CPU. You will need to convert the AVCHD footage to a less-compressed, easier-to-edit format such as Cineform.

[Alain Aguilar]

You'd be surprised how well my slow machine is working, as long as there are no effects involved :-) Before I edit I render the files on the time-line and then I edit from there. No lags once the files have been rendered. Now it's terrible when I have to apply effects and minor color correction. So I'll give Neo Scene a try and will look for any encoder for the native Canon 5d H.264. I used MPEG Streamclip but It does not seem to work in my Windows system. It seems it does not have a streamlined conversion to something I can use in CS4 and it seems more suitable for FC.